Beware Windows Vista and Physical Disk Errors!
(For Windows Vista Users)

Wow, let me first preface this article with the fact that I am not a Windows Vista hater. I have been using Windows Vista since it was released to beta. I have generally liked the enhanced stability of the operating system. I have also found some if not all, the new security features of Vista to be irritating at best. As a programmer of hard drive utilities I had originally considered the new security feature of Vista that blocks access to the low level of a disk to be a completely unreasonable change of the operating system. I had also assumed that Microsoft would have certainly placed proprietary API (Application Interface) calls into the new system so that they would not have to be constrained by this restriction.

Back in February 2008 I read news group posting by a Microsoft engineer that basically said that the programmers at Microsoft were using the same APIs that were available to everyone else to access the low levels of a disk. Needless to say I do not believe that they would have restricted themselves like that. That is until I saw for myself that a utility written by Microsoft fail to repair a disk.

I have in the time I have been using Windows Vista put it through may challenges breaking it purposely for testing. Every time I have either had a backup or used the Windows repair tools to fix the operating system. Let me back up a bit here and look at how long you might expect a hard drive to last. It is not unusual to see hard drive manufactures offer a "One million hours MTBF (Mean Time Between Failure)" along with a 5 year warranty. With modern advancements in hard drive technology, it is not too likely that you will be keeping a disk in service long enough to exceed either of these. There are of course provisos. Most hard drive failures in Desktop computers are caused by heat and in Laptops it shock or heat. These are physically damaged disks. It is much more likely that logical errors will cause data lose.

With that said, you better hope you never have a physical disk error (In system file area's) when using Windows Vista. If you have a backup great! I have any number of backups for operating systems from Windows 98 up to Windows Vista. Most users probably have but two drives for this purpose, one main drive and a backup drive. I regularly make backup on test machines to test new improvements in software I am developing. I have for sure had operating system backup failures caused by changes I have made to software. I have even had failures caused by errant software. I have also had physical errors in the past with Windows XP and all of these have been repairable situations without having to re-install Windows from scratch, until Windows Vista and its new security features.

To be sure, most of the time you will still have access to data on the drive albeit not be able to boot from the drive. Accept and perhaps if in the unlikely event that you are in the process of making a backup when the physical failure occurs. In this event both the main drive and the backup drive will be unbootable. Hopefully you still have access to the data. Remember that this is not a problem with operating systems from Windows 98 to Windows XP where low level repair utilities are available. Only Windows Vista and Windows 2008 Server suffer from this problem.

I am currently working on software to circumvent this problem with Windows Vista and Windows 2008 Server. I see the key to a solution as being the fact that the fact that the likelihood of a physical problem occurring is slight.